Managing the Double Bind: Women Directors’ Participation Tactics in the Gendered Boardroom

Women leaders who fail to manage the double bind by displaying both warmth and competence can face backlash, creating pressure for women to invest thought, time, and effort into their self-presentation. Research to date lacks theoretical insights around how women in the highest levels of leadership manage the double bind in natural settings. Our inductive study of interviews with 43 women directors on U.S. publicly traded company boards offers an insider’s perspective of participation tactics that women use to manage the double bind in male-dominated contexts. We found two features unique to advisory roles—a requirement that advisors possess a large breadth of knowledge and a time constraint whereby advisors meet less frequently with their peers—that suggest women directors adapt and learn how to participate on gendered boards. We uncovered six gendered participation tactics that mitigate stereotypical concerns for women to appear warm and/or competent on boards. We further reveal how women directors selectively use specific gendered participation tactics over others to effectively achieve their participation aims, which, in turn, helps them avoid backlash for mismanaging the double bind. Finally, we find that this matching process is constrained by the amount and scope of use related to the unique features of the advisory role. The emergence and trade-offs between the use of these novel gendered participation tactics deepen our theoretical understanding of women’s participation in advisory roles.